![]() ![]() One sees it in prison-books like Wilfred Macartney's Walls Have Mouths or Jim Phelan's Jail Journey, in the solemn idiocies that take places at the trials of conscientious objectors, in letters to the papers from eminent Marxist professors, pointing out that this or that is a 'miscarriage of British justice'. The professed enemies of society have this feeling as strongly as anyone else. ![]() Remarks like 'They can't run me in I haven't done anything wrong', or 'They can't do that it's against the law', are part of the atmosphere of England. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. “Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constituitionalism and legality, the belief in 'the law' as something above the state and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible. ![]()
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